About

The name on the door of the University of Saskatchewan’s Human Neuropsychology Lab belongs to Lorin Elias — supervisor to Austen Smith (PhD candidate), Trista Friedrich (PhD student – clinical), Jennifer Sedgewick (MA student), Meghan Flath (Honours student), and Paula Morton (Honours student). The lab’s research could not function without the help of the research assistants, Jeremy Storring, Sierra Kyliuk, and Abby Holtslander.

Our lab’s research is aimed at understanding how differences between brain hemispheres contribute to lateral biases in perception and attention. Our focus is on how these biases guide real-world asymmetries of behaviour such as: Driving, aesthetic preferences for art and advertisements (e.g., spatial composition, lighting direction), turning preferences (e.g., when kissing; posing for a picture), and modulating factors of lateral biases (e.g., native reading-direction, artistic expertise, emotional context).

We use cognitive and behavioural research methods which includes eye-tracking, real-world driving data from the Virginia Technology Institute of Transportation’s SHRP 2 study, and sophisticated gaming tasks designed by computer scientists from the U of S’s Human Computer Interaction Lab.